Landscaping

I used to holiday annually with my parents on the Ilse of Wight. We’d sit down to dinner, as a family, around 7pm most nights and watch the waves crash against possibly one of Britain’s most beautiful beaches; the golden sands of Sandown.

As dusk began to settle, and the lights of the pleasure pier sparkled incandescently, a faithful group of metal detectors descended upon the beach.

I used to be quite offended by their presence. Especially when I’d see them pick up a wristwatch, spare change or goodness knows what else. I’d work myself up more so as I began to put a story behind their treasures. What if the man who lost that watch had conscientiously scrimped and saved for months to buy it. What if that meager spare change that twilight beach comber eagerly pocketed had actually been budgeted to pay for a family meal. I guess someone would be going hungry tonight. Or possibly without a 99 flake tomorrow.

Despite my internal condemnation of their hobby, each night they returned after the last of the families and holidaymakers begrudgingly left the beach.

Then, years later, I met Ian.

Ian also enjoys the odd spot of metal detecting. I remember when he told me he had two metal detectors; my heart sank as I remembered the anger I felt towards those brazen beach combers. But Ian isn’t the type that lays in wait for families to unknowingly leave stuff behind on the beach. No. Ian prefers to scour recently disturbed patches of land. The type that are about to be ravaged by progress, cheap housing and more roads.

He jokingly calls himself a treasure hunter. He’s found old Roman coins in the past. As someone who loves ancient history, I couldn’t help but get excited at the prospect of what he might find on his next treasure hunt, so I decided to accompany him to Stewartby, along with my new telephoto lens.

Unfortunately, Ian didn’t manage to find anything. But I got some great shots. I think they capture the anticipation and the far reaching possibilities that the land could give up.

Video Art:Tire Meat | Tyre Meet

For my recent solo exhibition at Bedford College, I created a piece of video art where I layered two video tracks captured almost two years apart, but unified through the subject matter’s shape and editing style.

Using the circle motif, I attempted to introduce sequential footage with minimal disruption to the viewing parameter

The piece is called “Tire Meat | Tyre Meet”, looped during my exhibition, but cut for a blog taster.

Boil in a bag chicken

I’ll begrudgingly admit that I’m not a great cook. Some say (namely my parents) that I’m not an accomplished cook because my diet is too restrictive.

For all my sins I’m a vegetarian – a vegan for several years – and the latter was during my student years, so as you can imagine, mastering the art of fine dining was pretty low on my list of priorities.

That’s not to say I was eating unhealthily – far from it. But my relationship with food is almost synonymous with my feelings towards excretion – I like to get it over and done with as soon as possible. And I do it because I have to do it.

For some, this hasty attitude also extends towards buying, growing, and in some cases, the rearing of food too. People want to buy their food efficiently, yield their crops swiftly and feed their animals to obesity all the way to the abattoir (sorry, I felt a slight twinge of militarism there).

And I suppose, this is where my concerns lie. Although I’ve never been one to be complacent about where my food comes from – even if readiness is usually an overriding factor – I feel uncomfortable about the pace of cattle farming. A living breathing being is reared to a supermarket’s edible standard, slaughtered and then adorned in plastic or which ever material allows the consumer to quickly slap it on their plate.

I don’t know which one influenced the other, but my reasons for continuing to shun meat is largely due to the latent, speedy consumerism imparted onto life.

Anyway, I don’t need to show you pictures of factory farming or bleeding animals. We all know it exists. I’m not a spokesperson for PETA for goodness sake.

In the triptych below, you’ll see an experiment with latex in re-purposed packaging bags which were hung from the tops of the walls in an installation at Middlesex University.

I tried to evoke the latent brutality that the flesh of mass produced meat carries with it, which is only enhanced by the clinical packaging. It’s called boil in a bag chicken: